New thinking: Wired Next Generation 2013

This article was taken from the January 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online. "I've brought you here to change the course of your life," announced Wired editor David Rowan at the start of the first ever Wired Next Generation conference on 19 October. The event, which took place at London's Tobacco Dock, immediately after the two-day Wired 2013 conference, aimed to inspire the next wave of world changers: 12- to 16-year-olds.

The purpose of the day's activities, Rowan explained, was to show that "pretty much everything that people say can't be done, can, with the right kind of teams behind them and the right kind of tools." This point was proved again and again by a line-up of speakers who at some point in their career had not taken no for an answer.

Meanwhile, visitors were invited to explore new products and technologies in the interactive zone, and develop their own skills in a series of workshops that covered everything from making a sci-fi film to eating insects. Finalists in the Next Generation app competition, which challenged teens to design an app that solved a new problem, also had the opportunity to hone their ideas with industry experts in special "app clinics". Projects that made the shortlist included an app that conducts virtual dissections, an app for first-time mothers and a smart-alarm app. The winners were Zahra Kazmi, Hewan Zewdu and Jiawen Zhang from the Watford Grammar School for Girls, with The It Game, a virtual version of tag that uses GPS to let players track their opponents. And singer Eliza Doolittle also achieved the impossible, getting the entire main stage audience to dance with an event-closing set.

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Themes of innovation and inspiration ran through the day, and as emotive language technician Marshall Davis Jones told the teenagers: "You are all nature's disruptive technology. You come here with the intent to change everything."

Claire Crowley

Nick Wilson

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The life-saver: Claire Crowley

When science breaks out of the lab, it can save lives - as a talk from PhD candidate and researcher Claire Crowley showed. In 2011, she was part of a team that designed and manufactured the world's first synthetic transplanted organ: a windpipe made of a specially designed nanocomposite polymer.

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Now in her final year of her PhD at University College London, Crowley started her talk with the story of another PhD student, Andemariam Beyene, from Eritrea, who had been studying geology in Iceland for just a few months when he was diagnosed with late stage trachea cancer. He was given just two to three weeks to live - not long enough to find an organ donor. That's when Paolo Macchiarini, a visiting professor at UCL, found out about the case. "He said, 'Claire, I've got this patient,'" recalled Crowley. "'He has two weeks and he needs us to make a trachea for him, otherwise he's going to die.'"

Working around the clock, the team built a polymer windpipe scaffold before seeding it with Beyene's own stem cells. Crowley then took the organ to the Stockholm hospital where the patient was being treated, and it was successfully transplanted in a 15-hour operation. She showed a photo of herself with Beyene, who has since completed his studies and become a father, and said meeting him was the most rewarding experience of her life.

All this was achieved because her team refused to accept any limitations. "You'll never hear anyone in our lab saying, 'I don't think that's possible,'" she said. "We might not be there yet, but anything's possible."

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The pharmacist: Jack Andraka

Like "any respectable teenager", Jack Andraka tried to pirate stuff. The difference being that Andraka was torrenting scientific journals - part of his mission to develop a test for pancreatic cancer. The disease had claimed the life of a family friend when Andraka was 13. "In the course of three short months, he went from a perfectly functioning human to a skeleton," said Andraka. And there was no way existing tests could have caught it.

So Andraka decided to develop a new one. Through his online research, he tracked down the protein that indicates the initial stages of the cancer. He asked 200 different professors for lab time; eventually, one said yes ("One thing I learned was that professors aren't nearly as nice as their little profile pictures make them look"). After seven months, he created his sensor: "168 times faster and 26,000 times cheaper than the existing system."

Andraka is currently working with pharmaceutical companies to take his sensor to market. But his message on stage was about those journals he tried to pirate. He had emailed the professors who had written the papers "but they told me, 'the journal owns our copyright now'. So the professors can't even give me their own research." Andraka pointed out that although you can buy a Katy Perry track for less than a pound, it costs £22 to view a seminal research paper, and that Harvard University - the richest academic institution in the world - said it can no longer afford research journals. "Science benefits from the open flow of information, not paywalls," Andraka argued. One per cent of the population has access to scientific papers, he said - a "knowledge aristocracy", whereas, he said, "we could live in a knowledge democracy".

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The animator: Gavin Strange

Gavin Strange took the Wired Next Generation stage with two good friends: Wallace and Gromit. In his role as senior designer at Aardman Animations, Strange builds games and apps that launch the Plasticine characters into new digital worlds - and in doing so proves that the art of storytelling isn't confined to any one medium. "It took a long time for us to get everyone excited and say, 'Look, there's also this whole world of digital creation that can take these amazing characters, ideas and stories, and give them a new space,'" he recalled.

Outside of his work at Aardman, Strange goes under the alias "JamFactory" and likes to explore different creative outlets, from drawing cartoons and taking photographs to painting skateboards and designing T-shirts. "I like to turn my hand to absolutely everything, because there's no one to tell you you can't," he said. His recent projects include creating a series of vinyl toys called Droplets, and producing a documentary, Böikzmöind, about riding fixie bikes in Bristol.

Strange explained that he was on a mission to bring back the term "polymath", and pointed to historical role-models such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Albert Camus, as well as contemporary creatives including Lena Dunham, Takeshi Kitano and Oprah Winfrey. He finished his talk by advising those considering a creative career to accept every opportunity and indulge their curiosities. "Never, ever, ever make anything for money," he said. "Do it for the love of it."

The game developer: Johan Bernhardsson

"How many of you here have heard of Minecraft?" asked Mojang AB developer Johan Bernhardsson. Nearly all hands were raised - unsurprising, considering the game has over 30 million users.

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Bernhardsson, who works on the mobile version of Minecraft at Mojang's Stockholm office, described what it was like to work for a small company with a huge fan base. "In Minecraft, people are actually allowed to create their own world, create their own gameplay, and that creates a whole new level of passion for the game," he said. He regularly gets requests from fans to add new features, but said it was important Minecraft didn't stray too far from its basic core: "We believe that we can improve the experience with what we have."

However, Bernhardsson didn't always appreciate keeping things simple. When he first decided he wanted to be a game developer around 2004, he recalled, "I wanted to make the games that I wanted to play, which were made by 100 people over a two-year period."

Then mobile games arrived. "Here you suddenly have a platform where you can sell games that took two months to make, and they're really good," said Bernhardsson. He left aspiring game developers and future "Mojangstas" with the lesson he learnt: "Don't try to build big pyramids - build small ones instead."

This article was first published in the January 2014 issue of WIRED magazine